Freedom Stew

“What are you going to say about Steve Jobs?” everyone has been asking me – or at least, the rare subset of people who know about this column and are also sufficiently co-located to bump into me in restaurants and bars. “Important guy…he changed the world…must be lots to mention…”

Actually, I wasn’t planning on saying anything. There are certainly many people out there writing about the passing of Apple’s enigmatic founder. What could I add? I never met the man. But most of the commentary isn’t really about personal reflections anyway – it is about Apple’s role in the greater culture, and I can certainly comment on that as well as anyone, having lived through 100% of it from my vantage point out in the ether.

Steve Jobs had a vision for taking extremely complex things and coaxing them into a state of supreme simplicity. For that alone he will surely be remembered, and his skills were so profound that, yes, it really might be appropriate to use a word like “genius” to describe him. He had a remarkable ability to transform a very pure vision of simplicity into actual, concrete objects.

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